Jason Artman

The preferences of the vaping community have definitely changed over the years – and if you’ve been vaping long enough, you can probably remember a few vaping products from the past that would never, ever sell today. Have you been around long enough to remember cigalikes with disposable sponge-filled cartridges? What about the original eGo e-cigarette – or the first iStick mods? One certain thing about the way the vaping industry has evolved over its first decade is that vapers are always on the hunt for what’s new and sexy. Beginner vapers, however, don’t seem to have nearly as many options as they once did. There’s pretty much JUUL and – well, JUUL – and some of us are pretty sick of that company’s marketing shenanigans.

Sure, there’s nothing stopping a new vaper from skipping JUUL and heading straight to a mod. Let’s face it, though; many new vapers simply don’t want mods at first. What they really want is something that’s small and convenient and mimics a real cigarette as closely as possible. Whatever happened to the classic e-cigarette starter kit – the type that most of us started with so many years ago? What makes traditional e-cigarette kits so special, and why do they seem to have become a lost art here in the United States? What could the next generation of e-cigarette companies learn from classic e-cigarette starter kits? Let’s examine the lost art of e-cigarette kits a little more deeply and learn more about why those kits could still hold plenty of interest for smokers-turned-vapers.

A Good E-Cigarette Kit Feels Like a Truly Complete Package

Have you ever opened a JUUL starter kit? A JUUL kit is an extremely spartan package containing nothing but a battery, a USB charger and a handful of pre-filled pods. When you open a JUUL kit, you don’t feel empowered to take on whatever situation you may encounter during your transition from smoking to vaping. You don’t feel like you’re ready to make a major life change. You don’t feel like you’ve just joined an exclusive club. The only thing you really feel is that you’re probably going to need to grab a box of refill pods soon.

A great e-cigarette starter kit, in comparison, will leave you feeling empowered because it’ll include every accessory you’re likely to need during your transition. Accessories like wall charging adapters, portable battery charging cases and plenty of refill cartridges are exactly what new vapers want to see. A good e-cigarette kit feels like a truly complete package. That helps new vapers feel prepared for the transition away from smoking and gives them a level of confidence that helps to make the switch easier.

An E-Cigarette Starter Kit Promotes a Consistent Brand Identity

An e-cigarette kit often has its maker’s logo stamped just about everywhere – on the packaging, on the battery and on all of the accessories. E-cigarette kits can feature very prominent and powerful branding in ways a JUUL starter kit doesn’t. Opening such a kit is a powerful experience that definitely makes you feel as though you’re included in something special.

Consider tobacco cigarettes in comparison; tobacco companies brand their products with a razor-sharp focus that has virtually no equal. They understand that the differences between cigarette brands are minimal. How a cigarette brand tastes isn’t nearly as important as the way that customers feel when they associate themselves with that brand. Brand identity is something that’s largely been lost as the American vaping industry has gradually shifted from traditional e-cigarettes to mods.

Nothing Is Easier to Use Than a Traditional E-Cigarette

Although vaping does make achieving a smoke-free lifestyle much easier than it once was, the initial transition from smoking to vaping isn’t always easy for everyone. During that transition phase, the last thing you want is a device that’s anything less than completely simple and user friendly. One of the best things about the traditional e-cigarette kit is the fact that it’s a platform that has seen years of refinement and has probably now reached its peak in terms of performance and reliability. Some people might say, of course, that the pod system represents a further evolution of the classic cigalike – but pod systems have a long way to go before they’ll be as reliable as cigalikes. Even though pod systems have been around for years, people still deal with problems like leaky pods and dry hits. Cigalikes generally do not have problems like those.

Traditional e-cigarettes are also incredibly easy to use because there’s no fiddling and virtually no troubleshooting necessary, ever. No flavor? Replace the cartridge. No vapor? Charge the battery. Switching flavors is as easy as unscrewing one cartridge and screwing on another one. Pod systems are equally easy to use – at least if they have pre-filled pods – but the fact that you occasionally need to troubleshoot problems with a pod system adds an extra layer of difficulty that traditional e-cigarettes lack. If you’ve ever needed to disassemble a JUUL because a leaky pod contaminated the device’s internal electronics, you know exactly what we’re talking about here. Cigalikes can’t be disassembled for troubleshooting, and if you do happen to ruin a battery by getting it wet, replacements are always cheap.

A Traditional E-Cigarette Has the Feel That Many Smokers Want

The one aspect of traditional e-cigarettes that have no peer in the vaping world is the fact that using a cigalike feels very close to the act of smoking a cigarette. You can hold a cigalike between two fingers while you vape. Some cigalikes are so light that you can even let them hang from your lips if that’s what you prefer. Have you ever seen someone struggling to keep a JUUL between their lips? It doesn’t work at all.

Pod systems definitely have their benefits; they’ve revolutionized the vaping world for a reason. Still, building and selling traditional e-cigarette kits is something of a lost art in the United States, and it’s a tradition that deserves to make a comeback for many reasons. No consumer has ever benefitted from having fewer choices available.

When you read the discussions on Reddit or any vaping forum, you can find no shortage of conversations in which people compare the merits of local vs. online vape shops. If you’re the owner of a brick-and-mortar vape shop, it probably stings a little to see complaints of price gouging by local stores.

Don’t those people understand how difficult it is to run a brick-and-mortar store in the Internet age?

You’re not subcontracting the packaging and shipping duties to a third-party warehouse that’s also handling order fulfillment for dozens of other online vape shops. You’re buying your own merchandise, paying your own rent and utility bills and creating jobs for real people in your community.

You have huge expenses that the online vaping superstores don’t have, and there’s almost no way to run a brick-and-mortar store while competing with online sellers on a price basis.

If you can’t compete on price, how can your local vape shop compete with online vape shops?

Through my vaping SEO service at eCig One, I have worked with brick-and-mortar vape shops around the world – and each one of them has the same challenge. In this article, I’ll share some of the insight I’ve gained from working with those businesses.

What You Can Gain by Competing With Online Vape Shops

At this point, you might be wondering why you should even try competing with online vape shops. If you can’t compete on price, after all, what can you do?

It’s worth the effort to try to win that business, though, because it’s a major opportunity for growth.

When you think about it, there are really only three ways for a local vape shop to capture new customers.

1. You can capture customers who normally shop at competing vape shops.
2. You can convince smokers to switch to vaping and shop at your store.
3. You can convert online shoppers into local buyers.

If you’re not doing what you can to convince people in your community that you can offer a better buying experience than the online vaping superstores, you’re leaving an important growth opportunity on the table.

#1) Get Involved in Your Community

The relationship between a business and its community runs in both directions. Cities only have so much revenue to spread around, and they look to local businesses to pick up some of the slack.

There are so many opportunities for giving back to your community and making life a little nicer for the people who live there. You can volunteer to keep a local street clean and pick up litter there with your employees once a month.

You can partner with a local brewery or wine seller and hold an event in which attendees can experience different e-liquid and beverage pairings.

You can sponsor a team in a local athletic league.

It doesn’t take a lot of money to make life in your community a little better – and every step of the way, you can remind the vapers in your city that spending their money at a local vape shop rather than online means that they’re doing their part to improve life for everyone in the community.

#2) Remind Customers of the Jobs They’re Supporting

Whether someone buys vape gear online or in a local vape shop, he or she is supporting jobs. If you’re going to do your part to help keep people employed, would you rather support the jobs of anonymous warehouse workers across the country or local workers whose names you actually know?

Unless your vape shop is a one-person operation, you’re providing jobs to members of your community. There is nothing more valuable to a city than a population of people who are employed, paying taxes and bettering their lives.

Take every possible opportunity to remind people that purchases at your vape shop support the jobs of local people who enjoy their jobs and earn good, livable wages.

#3) Create a Fun Buying Environment

There’s a reason why many vape shops have lounge areas where people can relax and vape, and it’s not just because the owners of those shops want to create trendy hangout spots. It’s also because anything that makes a local store a fun place to be – that encourages people to stop in even when there’s nothing that they urgently need – increases traffic.

Running a vape lounge also means that you can potentially earn extra money from selling ultra-profitable sodas, coffee drinks, and snacks.

Not interested in turning your vape shop into a lounge? No problem; there are plenty of other ways to create a fun buying experience that makes people want to come in.

Try creating a tiered customer loyalty program in which customers gain “experience points” and “level up.”

The more your reward program feels like a game, the more your customers will want to “play.”

Start a tournament bracket during March Madness and encourage your customers to vote by buying their favorite e-liquids. Offer a significant discount to all customers the day after a local sports team wins a game. Above all else, be creative.

#4) Offer an Online Sales Component

The fact that you run a brick-and-mortar shop doesn’t mean that you can’t still sell your products online. In fact, setting yourself up for online sales might even be easier for you than it is for some new online vape shops because you’ve already jumped through the necessary hoops to open a merchant account with a payment processor. Many new online vape shop owners have no idea how difficult it can be to get a merchant account for a vape shop until they’re already deeply invested.

Don’t forget that adding an e-commerce component to your website doesn’t have to only be about taking orders and mailing products. You can also allow customers to buy online and pick up their purchases in your store. That’s especially useful if your vape shop is often busy. Customers can buy and pay online, pick up their orders at your brick-and-mortar vape shop and be gone in a flash.

#5) Offer Local Delivery

It may not be possible for your brick-and-mortar vape shop to compete with the online vape shops on price, but you can also give your customers something that no online vape shop can: instant gratification.

A customer might pay a few dollars more for that sub-ohm tank or bottle of e-liquid, but he or she has it in their hands immediately.

If your local laws allow for it, you can make that gratification even more instant by offering a local delivery service. Out of e-liquid? Just burned out your last coil? No problem; one of our friendly delivery drivers can be at your home or office in about 30 minutes.

The quicker you can get products into your customers’ hands, the less likely they will be to ever consider buying vape gear online.

#6) Curate Your E-Liquids

Unless you happen to let your employees sample the products, they most likely haven’t tasted every e-liquid in your store – and even if they have, not every customer is going to want to ask what a vape juice with a name like “Kool Lagerfeld” tastes like.

Wine shops have the same problem.

They solve it by writing descriptions and placing them in front of the bottles. Don’t want to write descriptions of every e-liquid in your store? No problem; build a curated collection of the very best e-liquids and place description cards in front of those e-liquids.

Offering every e-liquid on the planet isn’t going to bring extra business your way; the online vape shops already do that. Curating an e-liquid collection that feels selective and exclusive, on the other hand, is something your competitors aren’t doing.

This is also the ethos behind the VapeBeat Store – less is more. Just good quality juice, made in America, in flavors that people love. And it works too; we’ve already got over 1000+ 5-Star reviews and we only launched at the beginning of 2019.

#7) Find Ways to Become More Efficient

As a brick-and-mortar vape shop owner, you probably operate with the assumption that there’s no way for you to compete with the online vape shops – but have you actually tried? If you can find a way to reduce your operating expenses and make your employees’ time more productive, it may be possible for you to lower your prices or at least improve your profitability with your current pricing structure.

When you’re looking for ways to increase efficiency, start with your POS system. Are you still using an old-fashioned cash register and card swipe machine? A modern POS – like this one – can handle card payments while tracking your inventory and managing your customer loyalty program automatically.

Want to know who your best customers are? Want to send an automated text message and coupon to the customers who haven’t visited in a while? Want to know which products you’ll need to reorder soon?

A modern POS can do all of that and much, much more. If you aren’t using one, perhaps it’s time you did. And right now, millions of store owners swear by this one.

In the United States, a funny thing has happened to the venerable cigalike over the past few years: It has almost completely disappeared. If you look around at some of the biggest overseas vaping markets, however – the United Kingdom and Australia, to name two examples – the cigalike has not had the same fate in those nations.

Cigalikes are, in fact, alive and well outside the United States, and while the vaping industry in the United Kingdom is healthy and growing, the U.S. vaping industry often appears as though it’s about to go down the tubes.

What happened?

It turns out that the continued existence of the cigalike might be one of the major reasons for the health of the U.K. vaping industry.

In this article, we’re going to examine some of the differences between the U.S. and U.K. vaping industries. The differences between the two nations in their regulatory attitudes toward vaping have led to major differences in the products that vapers can buy. U.K. vaping regulations, most notably, prevented a certain infamous vaping device from appearing and claiming a large slice of the vaping market as it has in the U.S.

Strap yourself in. You’re about to learn why the cigalike continues to survive – and thrive – in the United Kingdom and why companies like V2 Cigs UK continue to do brisk business.

Europe Implemented Common-Sense Vaping Regulations Early

The biggest difference between the U.S. and U.K. vaping industries is that the European Union implemented common-sense vaping regulations as soon as it became obvious that vaping wasn’t going away. Written in 2014, the E.U. Tobacco Products Directive (TPD) – which the U.K. follows – has one key rule that has affected the evolution of the U.K. vaping industry in ways the law’s creators couldn’t have possibly foreseen. That rule is a limit on the nicotine strength of any e-liquid product; the maximum allowable nicotine strength is 20 mg.

While Europe regulated e-cigarettes right away, the U.S. took a wait-and-see approach and didn’t announce regulations for the vaping industry until August 8, 2016. On that day, the FDA froze the current state of the vaping industry and demanded that no new vaping products enter the market without first going through the pre-market approval process. By then, though, JUUL – now the world’s best-known vaping product – had already been released.

During the early years of the product, JUUL pods were available in just one nicotine strength: 5 percent. JUUL was incredibly popular. Years passed before PAX Labs – the maker of JUUL before JUUL Vapor was spun off into a separate company – was able to manufacture enough pods to meet demand. Since the 5-percent nicotine strength was higher than what the TPD allowed, JUUL wasn’t legal to sell in the U.K. or any other E.U. state.

JUUL didn’t launch in the U.K. until 2018. The nicotine strength of U.K. JUUL pods is just 18 mg.

The Cigalike Hasn’t Led to a Youth Vaping Epidemic

Let’s recap. When the FDA announced its vaping regulations for the U.S. in 2016, every product that was already on the market was allowed to remain on the market. In the U.K., meanwhile, the law required all vaping product manufacturers to limit the nicotine in their products to less addictive levels. What are the results of those differences?

The U.S. Has a Youth Vaping Epidemic

In the U.S., the most popular vaping product doesn’t look like a cigarette; it looks like a USB thumb drive. It is incredibly easy to conceal. It produces very small vapor clouds, so stealth vaping is easy with it. It also delivers nicotine as efficiently as a tobacco cigarette.

For JUUL, those features turned out to be a recipe for disaster.

The young do not always do what they’re told, and children sometimes have a nasty habit of trying things they shouldn’t. In the case of JUUL, many children who tried it ended up getting hooked on nicotine. An estimated 5 million U.S. children now vape regularly. Around one-quarter of high schoolers report having vaped in the last 30 days.

Vaping Doesn’t Appeal to U.K. Children

It’s obvious that the U.S. has a serious youth vaping problem on its hands. As it turns out, though, the U.K. has not had that same problem at all. According to a survey conducted by ASH, just 1.6 percent of British youth vape regularly.

In the survey, 83.5 percent of children reported either that they didn’t know what e-cigarettes were or that they had never tried vaping. The vast majority of the children who reported having tried vaping did not continue with it.

MORE: Breze Deluxe Pod Review – Why It’s Better Than JUUL

The two most likely reasons for that are the lower nicotine levels allowed in the U.K. – a nicotine strength of 20 mg has far less addictive potential than a strength of 50+ mg – and the design of the cigalike itself.

A cigalike doesn’t look like a memory stick; it looks like a cigarette.

The shape of the cigalike is purposely designed to appeal to smokers – there’s nothing fashionable about cigalikes whatsoever – and cigalikes are much more difficult to conceal in school because every teacher knows what a cigarette looks like.

All Hail the Cigalike

If you’ve been vaping long enough that you’re taking the time to read about your hobby online, chances are that you’re not using a cigalike. You’re puffing away on a mod, thinking back none too wistfully about the gas station cigalike that you used when you first made the switch to vaping.

It’s important to remember, though, that the traditional e-cigarettes experienced vapers often deride are still the points of entry that most new users use when they make the switch. Most people aren’t using sub-ohm mods when they first start vaping; they’re using traditional e-cigarettes. You don’t hear about the people who never bother upgrading to larger vaping devices because, for them, vaping isn’t a hobby.

They’re not spending their time reading websites like this one.

In the U.K., however, it’s possible to make a case for the notion that cigalikes have helped to preserve the nation’s entire vaping industry. Cigalikes don’t have broad appeal among children, and those who do try them quickly discontinue use because they aren’t hooked.

We, on the other hand, have an alleged full-fledged underage vaping epidemic and a President who has just threatened to take our flavored e-liquids away.

The cigalike is looking like a pretty smart device these days.